Sea
Reliance
Toronto, 1992
The lights came up and they were playing Spinning
Away -- a song about a painting --
And the waning of the promise of the synthesizer
met the first sweet rush of queer cinema
Now I can’t tell if the broke-down third-way
Moog-utopia the kids today are working out is just nostalgia or if they
constitute an opposition to their peers who are like yeah I wear flip-flops
because it’s all good
Children
of empire!
Out on the water
Sea-birds ships named after poets
Then I think of painting photos – how Richter uses
it to reassert the dominance of an older art –
The
casing on the earphones brushes past your lower lip
The
mighty Andrew Joron sailing by
Andrew! Tell me what poetry should be about –
I have a list of band names that comes close
A note in my notebook says, if your poems are
based on optimism about people you are fucked
But I don’t believe it
Little empty Starfleet Academy in the Port of
Oakland
A little bit of Know Your Enemy
Colors singing out from under movements of the
squeegee
“The Wealthy – who were also called Perpetual
Sailors – ”
Chris Nealon is the author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001), and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), as well as two books of poems, The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004) and Plummet (Edge Books, 2009).
